Evaluation of project

This has been a very busy module for me this year it has really tested my time management skills and been a high workload to complete. saying that i have really enjoyed doing it and am really pleased with the end product. we started off with a fairly loose idea of doing three different radio through the times and animating them accordingly. The end product was really nice and the whole group worked really well together to acheive the final animation. I have learnt so many new skills with 3ds max this year including advanced lighting and material use through the animation and the head model we did the first 6 weeks. i have especially improved my rendering outcomes as my 3d modelling skills are starting to take shape and i am starting to realise what im good at in max. There are thing i feel we could have improved on in the final peice such as maybe making the film a bit longer and animating the radios in a bit more detail but these are all things which were hampered buy time which we didnt have alot of in the module. To sum the whole project up i feel we did really well as a group and produced a good end product and i feel each team member really did there own part and shared the responsibility of the project equally. As i said earlier i have really enjoyed this project and richard has done a really good job in teaching it and i continue to learn new skills and develop better group working skills because of it. :)

New techniques learnt

For the first time ever i learnt how to create a glass tecture and apply it to a window pain to acheive a really nice reflective serfure in the render when the camera zoom through the window in the 3d animation. As i explain earlier the steps i took to create the material and apply it so it reflected the surrounding area in the render. This is something i will use to great affect in the future and had alot of fun learning to do it and implement it. One thing i am starting to see in this module is i keep on expanding my skill set in 3ds max and that is definatly a positive thing.

Final camera and scenes

Camera 4



Camera 3



Camera 2



Camera 1



Here are the screen shots from the final 4 cameras to capture the outside scenes for the animation. they are all target cameras and they were placed so that all aspects of the outside modelling would be captured.

One camera was to zoom into the chelmsford sign with a slight curve done with the set key on the time line. Another was placed orbiting the model for around ten seconds, this was done buy creating a path and then atrtaching the camera to it and adjusting it in the time line accordingly. Another was then placed over the hair and furr grass which would end up going into the window this one gave a really nice render which took a long time as ill describe later. The last camera was set to pan out from the birdseye view and position and end showing the chelmsford landmass the house is sat on.

4 final rendered scenes for the Animation

The four scenes will be used in the final animation to start and finish it.

camera 1 is a zoom into the chelmsford sign with the target camera.

camera 2 is a rotating shot of the whole enviroment with a target camera on a oval path

camera 3 is a zooming camera which goes across the garden and into the window reflection with a target camera.

camera 4 is a zoom out from the roof of the house for the ending titles which uses a target camera also.

All the footage comes to about 25- 30 seconds and took around 50 hours to render which i think is worth it as the scenes look really good. The end aspect ratio was 720px by 460px which looks good and was decided because the larger format which was asked for would have taken to long to render all the scenes in time.

Environment finished camera and animation time

Here is the finished outside environment ready for the camera and lighting to be animated. I just added a gradient background because it looked a lot better then the actual skyline pic i had tried before.

Environment change

Once i had made all the outside components i just felt there was something lacking i didn't want to fill the rest of the camera space with a grass plane image or something dull like that so i decided to put the small setting on a map outline of essex. Genius! All i did to achieve this was to get a plane and put the essex map off the internet on it and then trace round it with the line tool in max and then extrude it to the desired depth. i then applied the colours to it via the materials editor and it was done.

Here I have added some grass with the use of the hair and fur modifier. its fairly simple I just created a plane to represent where the grass was to grow from and then used the modifier to apply the specifics characteristics I wanted the grass to have e.g. height, compactness, colour.

Here is the rendered image with the path and fence added around the house.